Zixinus wrote:Nobody else here has the patience of energy to just tell you how stupid and ignorant you are.
Right. Now that you've got that off your mind, onto the debate:
Me: Self sustaining polywells can potentially be very small and road/rail portable.
You: And would kill the transporter
A) When has that mattered to a suicide bomber?
B) Polywells are inert until they are turned on.
C) If the driver is willing to settle for 'merely' 40% casualties, (or he has some minor protection for himself) he won't feel anything for 1-6 hours.
liquid nitrogen <snip> High vacuum <snip> reactor is a an egg waiting to collapse on itself.
Liquid nitrogen is portable. It just is. It won't have to last very long.
High vacuum (NanoTorr range) isn't difficult. Nor is the equipment particularly large or heavy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbomolecular_pump
And the eggshell thing just makes me laugh. Vacuum of any kind merely exerts one (1, singular, not plural) atmosphere of inwards force. That's baby-taps in engineering terms.
18-wheelers can carry 50 or 60 tons if you care to over load them. Mr Bussard himself has estimated that a 10GW space-engine reactor would weigh 50 tons. I'm sure we could build a smaller 100MW reactor for less.
So again, what are your reasons for thinking this so completely impossible?
a Polywell reactor has to be active and draw from a very, very powerful power source before it can archive self-sustainment. Power levels that are not found in your avarage household. In fact, you are going to have difficulty getting that thing in the first place.
Ah. Interesting.
Though I said portable, not home use. A train car (or just a pair of thick cables) would work as well as a truck in this application. Would a MW class third-rail be good enough? 'Cause, you know, train companies leave those lying around all over the place.
Out of interest, precisely how much power and energy is required? If you need a MW/GW class APU, that's going to seriously dent the mass estimates for the space applications.
It's going to be a one hell of a shitty weapon as well, because anybody with a gun, perhaps a good rifle can turn the thing off.
You have to spot the right truck first. And if you go near enough to turn it off, chances are you'll be dead in a month. Nutty terrorists are willing to off themselves. The average police officer? Would they even recognise what they were looking at? Volunteers please? How many people are already walking dead by that point?
Get a couple of tons of artifical fertilizers, stick in a big detonator, time it and run away. Much, much cheaper and more effective.
If you're happy only killing a few dozen infidels then you could do that. If you have no great ambition I mean. If you want to kill thousands though you have to try harder than that young Abdul mi’ lad.
Many governments are publicly worried that terrorists are capable of complex plots. If they’re being truthful, they’ll worry about this. If they’re being deceitful, they may still act against such a paper-tiger to keep up their public image.
That's like saying. "I know how a bi-plane flies. I don't need a jet-engineer to know how to fly a 747."
A bi-plane and 747 do fly in the same way using essentially the same Wright Brothers control-surface system. (I studied aerospace for three years at Uni, so don’t even try debating me on this.) A 1920 engineer might be genuinely surprised at some of Boeing’s chosen solutions, but once he spent five minutes looking at them he would understand them. After asking a couple of questions he would understand the ‘why’ as well.
Now imagine the 1920 engineer saying, “But surely these giants pose additional dangers in comparison to bi-planes. What if they crashed? What would happen if a terrorist stole one and tried to crash them into a tall building? Wouldn’t that potentially kill a lot of people? ”
And you make a rude gesture and say: “That could never happen! No terrorist would ever kill themselves! You’re stupid! You obviously understand nothing about 747s! Take your appeal to authority (?) and shove it up your ass.”
And when have I ever appealed to higher authority?
If you know how a fusor works, then you can pretty easily figure out how a Polywell works. The peer-reviewed paper is still in the working, written by a sick, old man trying to summarize 10 years of work.
Understanding how they work is one thing. The whole ‘in practice output scales with the 7th power of radius’ on the other hand is not so simple. In the photos he has published he has always had many young and spry colleagues to assist him. Can’t they help write up the lab notes?
There is also a difference between publishing an equation (E is proportional to MC2 for example) and explaining it. Is the 7th power equation so large it won’t fit on a single sheet of A4? Would only three people in the nation understand it at first? Doesn’t matter. He should publish it anyway, if nothing else to prove to the world that he did it himself. Even if only a few people understood his work of genius, he would have the satisfaction of seeing that first gasp of recognition, and the pleasure of watching it grow until enough support existed for further research.
By keeping silent on the really useful stuff he has crippled himself. Why?
Me: This is about politics
You: A. It has nothing to do with this here.
Allow me to quote the forum guidelines for this section:
”JoeStrout” wrote: This forum is the place to discuss how the world might change if/when polywell fusion is developed and practical power plants come online. Social impacts, technological spin-offs, economic ramifications, and politics are all fair game.
You were saying?
And if you try and persuade them it will never happen because 'the driver would also die - and no terrorist would ever do that' they'll laugh in your face. So please, stop ignoring the original question, and stop posting nonsense.
We were not ignoring the question, you are the one posting nonsense.
WMD covers a variety of terrorist dirty tricks. Amongst these are anthranx and dirty bombs. Scientists, engineers, experts, learned professionals of all calibres have stood up and said these weapons are hopelessly impractical. The politicians ignored this boring reality, and chose to believe the much more interesting (but ultimately false) scare stories instead. Or maybe they didn’t, but chose to talk about the ‘dangers’ because that made for better headlines. Ditto for microwave health scares and MMR.
The same thing could happen to polywell. If the ITER advocates are even half as vicious as Bussard describes them as, this will come up. You need a quick, simple, and believable answer because politicians and the viewing public have short attention spans.